SmartMetric says fingerprint payment card will be available in Q1 2014

SmartMetric has announced that its fingerprint-activated payments card will be available for quantity sales in the first quarter of 2014.

According to the company’s CEO, Chaya Hendrick, there were many production issues that had to be overcome in order to produce the card in mass quantities – a necessity for financial institutions to adopt and deploy the system.

The payments card is designed to work with EMV chips and relies on a positive match of a user’s fingerprint stored on the card to authenticate payments.

It has been reported that there are currently more than 1.5 billion EMV cards in use around the world.

Reported previously, SmartMetric has long been planning the North American launch for this card but recently took a big blow in court, after a judge ruled that its long-standing patent lawsuit against Visa and MasterCard was not valid. SmartMetric’s complaint claimed MasterCard and Visa infringed its patent for a system to automatically connect to a network.

As Bloomberg reports, the judge ruled that neither Visa nor MasterCard infringed on SmartMetric’s patents, saying “the parties here are comparing apples and oranges.”

Last year, the company announced it received additional funding from private investors and that another million dollars would be added into the company chest to help fund expansion projects in Beunos Aires.

Article Topics

biometric payments  |  EMV  |  fingerprint  |  launch  |  SmartMetric